Kerbal Space Program

So after seeing how cheaty jets are, I decided to see about building a minimal 1-Kerbal crew lifter.

46.8% mass to a 100 km orbit, with plenty of fuel for orbital maneuvers.

2 stages: a jet-powered booster and a NERVA orbiter.

Oh yeah, for small things, jets are nuts. Are you making sure to, between 25-35km altitude flipping over and getting the most horizontal speed out of it possible? Unlike rockets, I make my jets lose all vertical velocity and go as flat as possible until I hit top speed with them, then I'll let them start going up again. Otherwise, I think you're leaving some delta-v on the table. Especially if you launch them like a traditional rocket. There is that narrow altitude where they are stupid strong, and if you aren't going nearly horizontal, you'll blow right by it and hit the flam out altitudes.

For larger things like I posted earlier, jets are great too, but it takes so many parts to keep them breathing (and just a lot of jets because they're small), but if you can deal with the lag, the same philosophy applies. However, it's really hard to get off the ground with jets alone at that size because they don't make much thrust near sea level.

I use jets on big lifters mostly as a high-altitude stage. I put a full orange tank in orbit with four orange tanks and six turbojets - told MechJeb to kick over at 15km and took a very, very gentle ascent out of the atmosphere to maximize the jets. Hit about 1500 m/s before I reached 40km.

Think horizontally instead of so many stacked fuel tanks. You can get to the Mun with one of those mid-size tanks from your last ship, and one orange tank. It doesn't take too long, but if you want to get there a little faster and have more fuel at the end, you could add just two more orange tanks with decouplers on the sides of the first one.

To actually get there you can use a maneuver node, or once you've gotten into orbit (by turning over at the 90* line so you're in line with the Mun), wait for the Mun to rise, then point your ship at 90* where the blue meets the brown on your navball. Switch to map view and burn until it says you've got a Mun encounter.

How, exactly, go about setting up an orbital rendezvous? I could just never get my orbits to match. I want to make a gigantic space station Can the Kerbals walk between adjacent cans? Also, how do I send up empty living quarters for them?

I don't know whether it's the new version release or the fact that I transferred over the Steam, but this game is just so much more stable and smooth now. I also finally figured out the controls well enough to manually get into orbit and arrange for an orbital translation to the Mun without Mechjeb. Of course, I didn't have enough fuel to circularise my orbit (and I forgot how at any rate), so my little Kerbal just sailed past looking wistful.

It tried landing me at "sea level"... when terrain level was 6,700 metres.

I'm not just going to blame MechJeb2 on this one: Minimus appears duplicated on my install. It did this back in 0.17.

Manually, I successfully reproduced the landing of an ion powered probe on Minimus, but with a much larger craft. Eight 1x6 solar panels, the Stayputnik core, three xenon tanks, one ion engine and four light lander legs, beefed up with four 400-unit batteries.

So blown up more ion landers than I care to list before realising that it seems at no point is it safe to stage during a MechJeb2 landing. Original MJ used to handle this by recalculating thrust - MJ2 isn't smart enough.

Compared to real life engines, the engines are exceptionally heavy and have a poor TWR (real life is around 50-100). On the other hand, fuel consumption is very, very low. So it kinda balances.

So the general staging strategy should be to get rid of as many engines as soon as possible. This is why "Asperagus" staging works so well in Kerbal Physics, whereas in real life vertical staging is king.

Also, jet engines have a way too good TWR ratio. Realistic would be around 3-5. They really need to be balanced.

So blown up more ion landers than I care to list before realising that it seems at no point is it safe to stage during a MechJeb2 landing. Original MJ used to handle this by recalculating thrust - MJ2 isn't smart enough.

Actually, it's safe to stage. Just turn off mechjeb and turn it back on.

...

Trying to get my new replacement rover to the mun. Darn thing tips over WAY too easily when going 20 m/sec. Also I can tip it over with hard braking. uuuugh. I can only operate my tug at 35% throttle or else it'll go totally off axis from the center of mass. That, and mechjeb is pretty bad at manouvers for low thrust levels, I had to reload a couple times since it kept starting the burn way too early and it thrust me into the ground. Oh well, old fashioned SmartASS prograde vector holding it is.

Is there any way to tell which mods are compatible with .20 or whatever the latest version ends up being in the future?

Went, uh, a little crazy on mods and half wouldn't load and then once I cleared out the broken mods so that it would load, half the remaining mods had no / broken graphics or do crazy things like lock the game up once placed.

Wiped and starting over with just mechjeb again for now, but even that was having some issues (some parts, once put onto the ship or just left in the active area could not be grabbed or moved, game would frequently not let me change camera angle until I selected another part, etc.)

Trying to get my new replacement rover to the mun. Darn thing tips over WAY too easily when going 20 m/sec.

My ion-plane (I like ions) uses rover wheels to accelerate on the runway. In 0.20, it just tips over. I hit about 22-25 m/s (the "press W" bug for accelerating still exists) and my wheels go to hell.

It's weird as my wheels are the leading and trailing edge of the low-profile vehicle, they physically cannot tip over - the CoG is level with the top edge of the rear wheels and between them, the ion drive is just behind the CoG.

And to be sure I'm doing this right - I download a .rar, open it, it has a folder - "mechjeb" - in there are folders parts, plugins, and ships. I drop those directly into c:\...\KSP and merge / overwrite the existing parts, ships, gamedata, etc. yes?

God, spaceplanes are SO EFFING TOUCHY. Launch isn't too bad with massive use of SAS. Landing is a total PITA, as is the jumbo variant I've been playing with that just doesn't have enough lift to take off.

Docking, man. I just don't know. I spent 3.5 hours (yes, real hours) this afternoon getting two satellites docked. I just tried it again and did it in less than 5 minutes from launch to dock, first try I feel like there's a handful of little gotchas that really made my life difficult the first time, so here's some thoughts if anyone else keeps watching their satellite float away at 2.1m/s. Use several exterior lights, so you can find your damn ship on the dark side (ooh, embedded red/green/white blinken nav lights would be neat). Put clusters of RCS on both ends of the ship, or else translating sideways is an exercise in extreme frustration. I also found it a lot easier to move around if I spun the ship so the planet was "down" on the navball, so everything moved like I expected, until I get a little better at this. Orbital matching is pretty annoying too, the first couple times. My grand schemes of orbital construction are looking a little more dicey, but maybe with more practice. Rocket science is hard, who would have thought?

I just usually make do with one ring of RCS around center mass. I also use very little RCS fuel when docking. Mainly final alignment corrections. If you're having problems with velocity, vector antigrade and thrust a very short burst from your main engines until you're under a m/s. Also, switch your target to the port you want to dock with, and switch your 'pilot from' to the port you want to dock with.

Basically, if I'm going manually, I turn off RCS unless I'm needing to thrust, and then immediately switch it off again to correct my orientation with torque steering.